Begging for War

“There are no good options,” Brian Williams said the other night on MSNBC,
launching a discussion about North Korea with the implication that war – maybe
nuclear war – is the only solution to the problem it represents.

We’ve been cradling our own suicide for seven decades. The baby’s eyes open…

And Williams was right, though not in a way that he understood. When war – forceful
domination, victory through threat, carnage and, if necessary, annihilation – is
the ultimate limit of one’s consciousness, there are no good options. Even the
peace negotiated in the context of war is bound to be temporary and grudging
and therefore a bad option – sort of like the “peace” achieved at the end of the
Korean War,
after which both sides still, as Reuters
reports, “have thousands of rockets and artillery pieces aimed at each other
across the world’s most heavily armed border.”

Only beyond the context of war are there any options at all. Only beyond the
context of war does humanity have any hope of avoiding suicide. And contrary
to the consensus viewpoint of mainstream politicians and reporters, this is
not completely unexplored territory.

Because Donald Trump is president, reaching for this trans-war consciousness
is as crucial as it has ever been.

Maybe the best place to begin is by noting that there are some 22,000 nuclear
weapons on the planet. This fact is almost never part of the news about North
Korea, which has, as of this week, when it detonated an alleged hydrogen bomb,
conducted six nuclear tests. The fact that Kim Jong-un’s tiny, unpredictable
country is a member of the nuclear club is disconcerting, but the fact that
there’s a “nuclear club” at all – and that its members are spending as much as
a trillion dollars a decade to modernize their nuclear weapons – is even more
disconcerting. And the fact that the modernization process is happening so quietly,
without controversy or public debate (or even awareness) exacerbates the horror
exponentially.

North Korea may be “begging for war,” as U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley exclaimed,
but it’s not alone in doing so. None of the planet’s nuclear-armed nations have
abided by the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which
explicitly calls for complete nuclear disarmament. How easy this has been to
ignore.

As Simon
Tisdall wrote recently in the Guardian: “…the past and present
leaders of the U.S., Russia, China, France and the U.K., whose governments signed
but have not fulfilled the terms of the 1970 nuclear non-proliferation treaty,
have to some degree brought the North Korea crisis on themselves. Kim Jong-un’s
recklessness and bad faith is a product of their own.”

Preparing for war produces, at best, obedience, which usually comes with hidden
resentments. Because North Korea has displayed defiance rather than obedience,
the mainstream media have portrayed the country and its leader as, essentially,
evil cartoon characters: a crazy country that doesn’t know its place and is
therefore begging for war.

To reach beyond war, to reach toward the future and create the possibility
that it will arrive – to create sensible options – first of all requires
dealing with one’s enemy with respect and understanding. In the case of North
Korea, this means revisiting the Korean War, in which some 3 million North Koreans
died and, as Anna
Fifield pointed out recently in the Washington Post, “the US Air
Force leveled the North, to the extent that American generals complained there
was nothing left to bomb.

“Ever since,” she writes, “North Korea has existed in a state of insecurity,
with the totalitarian regime telling the population that the United States is
out to destroy them – again.

“It is in this context that, following the collapse of its nuclear-armed benefactor,
the Soviet Union, the Kim regime has sought weapons of its own.”

She points out that this is not irrational behavior – certainly not for a small,
isolated country in the crosshairs of the United States. On a planet with no
good options, North Korea’s capacity to produce a little mutually assured destruction
may be its best bet to curtail invasion. Indeed, no nuclear-armed nation has
ever been invaded.

With that understanding in place, John
Delury, a professor at the Yonsei University Graduate School of International
Studies in Seoul, has some further advice to offer: “Now is the time,” he wrote
in the Washington Post in April, “to jump-start a diplomatic initiative
that reopens channels, lowers tensions and caps North Korea’s capabilities where
they are. Then, working closely with the new government in Seoul and others,
the United States should support a long-term strategy that integrates North
Korea into regional stability and prosperity….

“By simply inflicting economic pain, threatening military strikes and keeping
tensions high, the United States is playing into the worst tendencies of the
North Korean system. Kim’s nuclear intentions will harden and North Korea’s
capabilities will only grow. It’s time to reverse course.”

The time is now: to stop pretending that war will keep us safe, to stop cradling
humanity’s capacity to commit suicide.

And the United States is not Donald Trump. Our collective consciousness is
bigger than that of a bully. That means we have the capacity to understand that
the threat posed by North Korea is a reminder that nuclear disarmament for the
whole planet is long overdue. There are no good nuclear weapons.